As on-demand transmission of multimedia data and content at a desired time to a desired place has become possible, demand for such content distribution continues to rise. Users are generally satisfied with the convenience and flexibility of such content distribution, and enjoy being able to view and listen to the desired entertainment content simply and efficiently. As content owners have moved to address customer demand for such content distribution they are naturally concerned about the illegal use and distribution of their intellectual property. It is therefore necessary to balance the needs of content owners with the demands of content users.
Numerous technologies are available for content protection, including data encryption and digital watermarks. Different systems may use different mechanisms and protection technologies to distribute content securely. This means that terminals and content readers designed for use with a particular content protection technology can only playback or use content provided by a content provider using the same technology or method. In order to playback content from a different provider, it is necessary to change the terminal or device.
The MPEG standards group is working to develop standards for an IPMP system including a compliant terminal. All terminals can playback protected content encrypted and protected according to the same IPMP standard regardless of what IPMP tools are used. Such terminals have content decoders such as audio and video decoders, and the terminal can unlock the protection of protected content before decoding and reproducing the content. The protection information, that is, the IPMP tool information, must therefore be known and available to the terminal.
On the other hand the IPMP tools cannot be limited to specific predetermined tools because vendors need the flexibility to select the preferred tools for their own IPMP system. It is therefore necessary to define a standard method and interface enabling improvements in both flexibility and security.
Different vendors may use quite different implementations for user authentication and IPMP tool retrieval according to the prior art even though they use the same content decoder, such as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. This makes it very difficult for any single terminal to playback different content provided by multiple different content providers. In other words, the same protected content cannot be played back on different IPMP systems.
The present invention is directed to solving this problem and an object of our invention is to define a single intellectual property management and protection system enabling protected content to be used on different IPMP systems.
A further object of this invention is to provide a standard method enabling IPMP system implementers to build a secure system encompassing the encoder, channel distribution, and terminal.